Process description of SWQN : A simplified hydraulic model

SWQN is a simplified hydraulic model for surface water systems which computes water levels and flows in a network of nodes labelled as ‘volumes’ and segments labelled as ‘connectors’. The user can specify a variety of connectors like open water courses or structures such as weirs, gates, culverts or pumps. Water levels are calculated in the ‘volumes’ driving the one dimensional flows through the ‘connectors’ linking up the ‘volumes’. The assumption is that the flow between two nodes with an open connection in between is linearly dependent on the difference in water level, if necessary augmented with the difference in velocity head, the wetted profile, and a given resistance

Africa’s Nile basin countries should invest in rain, not big infrastructure projects

South Sudan could export as much as $1.8 billion in rain-fed food products, writes Christian Sideriu

Using Practical Supergain for Passive Imaging with Noise

Recent work has shown that endfire beamforming of ocean noise can be used to produce images of the seabed layering [Siderius et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 120, 1315–1323 (2006)]. This initial noise imaging technique used conventional beamforming and was later extended to adaptive beamforming that is theoretically optimal. However, there can be problems with adaptive methods, which include extreme sensitivity to random errors, the required averaging time, and computational complexity. Here, the concept of supergain is used to show that delay and sum beamforming can produce nearly the same results as the optimal adaptive methods without the drawbacks

Constitutional Law—Fourteenth Amendment—Religious Education—Validity of Released Time Programs

In 1948 the Supreme Court (8-1) held invalid under the 14th Amendment a system adopted by the Illinois Board of Education which permitted students, on written request of their parents, to be released during regular school hours for religious instruction or devotion in the public school buildings. McCollum v. Board of Education 333 U.S. 203, 2 A.L.R. 2d 1338 (1948). Under these so-called released time plans, non-participating children remain in the classroom and continue some form of secular study. Since the majority opinion in the McCollum case relied in part upon the metaphorical wall of separation between Church and State, an uncertain test was provided for the future disposition of systems distinguishable from that involved in the Illinois case. The constitutional vice in the McCollum plan could have been the use of public money and property for religious purposes, or more broadly, the coercive effect of the plan in that the children released from the classroom routine to the religious services were still satisfying the statutory obligation to attend school

Divorce Decree—Procedure to Invoke Jurisdiction to Modify

H obtained a default divorce decree under which W was given custody of two minor children and H was granted reasonable visitation privileges. Later H remarried and established residence in Montana, and, in order to enable the children to visit him there, filed a motion and affidavit for an order that W show cause why the decree should not be modified. The show cause order was granted, but meanwhile W, in an original application in the Supreme Court, requested a writ of prohibition restraining the Superior Court from modifying. She contended that Superior Court jurisdiction to modify cannot be invoked by a motion and affidavit. Held: Writ granted. RCW 26.08.170 [Rem. Supp. 1949 § 997-17] (formerly RRS § 995-3; PPC § 7511-3) provides that upon filing of a properly verified petition ... the Superior Court... shall have full and complete jurisdiction of the cause. State ex rel. Edwards v. Superior Court, 37 Wn. 2d 8, 221 P. 2d 518 (1950). The decision apparently implies that filing a petition is the only effective procedure

Practice and Procecdure—Rule 16—Grounds for Granting New Trial

P sued D for malpractice. After a verdict for P, the trial court granted D\u27s motion for new trial, citing Rule 16, sub. 9 of the General Rules of the Superior Court, 34A Wn2d 117, i.e., substantial justice has not been done. The court listed in the order granting the new trial the following reasons: insufficient evidence of negligence, prejudice of a juror, statements of P\u27s counsel tending to prejudice the. jury against D, speed of the verdict, consideration of the entire record and proceedings, and appearance and demeanor of witnesses. P appealed. Held: reversed and judgment for P according to the verdict. Rule 16 requires that in all cases where a trial court grants a motion for new trial it shall in the order of granting the motion give definite reasons of law and facts for so doing. The roasons based on the record are insufficient to warrant a new trial and the reasons based upon the trial court\u27s consideration of the proceedings and demeanor of witnesses do not show in what way D was prejudiced thereby. Mulka v. Keyes, 41 Wn. 2d 427, 249 P2d 972 (1952)

Advances in global hydrology–crop modelling to support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in South Asia

Achieving the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in the context of a rapidly changing climate and demographics is one of the major challenges for South Asia. Interventions aimed at achieving the SDGs will be varied and are likely to contain basin-wide trade-offs that need to be understood. In this paper, we synthesize recent global hydrology-crop model developments, with a specific focus on human impact parameterisations like the management of human built storage capacity, irrigation withdrawal and supply, and irrigation efficiency. We show that these models can help improve our understanding of the composition and flows of water, and the linkages between water scarcity and food production. To fully exploit the potential of improved models for policy support and the design of pathways towards SDG achievement, we envisage scope to include more local data from test fields and pilot sites, use the models to derive biophysical and financial feasibility of interventions, and improve the interaction with policy-makers and regional stakeholders through the development of better communication and visualisation tools

Source localization in a time-varying ocean waveguide

One of the most stringent impairments in matched-field processing is the impact of missing or erroneous environmental information on the final source location estimate. This problem is known in the literature as model mismatch and is strongly frequency dependent. Another unavoidable factor that contributes to model mismatch is the natural time and spatial variability of the ocean waveguide. As a consequence, most of the experimental results obtained to date focus on short source-receiver ranges (usually <5 km), stationary sources, reduced time windows and frequencies generally below 600 Hz. This paper shows that MFP source localization can be made robust to time–space environmental mismatch if the parameters responsible for the mismatch are clearly identified, properly modeled and (time-)adaptively estimated by a focalization procedure prior to MFP source localization. The data acquired during the ADVENT’99 sea trial at 2, 5, and 10 km source-receiver ranges and in two frequency bands, below and above 600 Hz, provided an excellent opportunity to test the proposed techniques. The results indicate that an adequate parametrization of the waveguide is effective up to 10 km range in both frequency bands achieving a precise localization during the whole recording of the 5 km track, and most of the 10 km track. It is shown that the increasing MFP dependence on erroneous environmental information in the higher frequency and at longer ranges can only be accounted for by including a time dependent modeling of the water column sound speed profile.SACLANTCEN; PRAXIS XXI, FCT

Strategic Reviews

The impact of product reviews on consumer purchasing behavior is empirically well documented. This can create perverse incentives for firms to offer reviewers side payments ("bribes") in exchange for biased reviews for their products. The presence of bribes distorts the information in reviews away from its first-best levels, and consequently leads to detrimental effects on consumer utility. This paper builds a dynamic two-sided reputation model where a reviewer can inflate her reviews in exchange for bribes. The problem the reviewer faces is the following: if she accepts bribes and misrepresents her reviews, then she builds her reputation as an inaccurate reviewer and eventually makes consumers less likely to follow her recommendations, which in turn makes firms no longer interested in offering her a bribe. Can the reviewer retain influence over consumers' purchasing decisions while simultaneously accepting bribes and misrepresenting her reviews? We provide a characterization of the environments that allow this kind of manipulation, and show that regulatory policies that aim to reduce bribes can lead to undesirable outcomes. Finally, we show that the absence of bribes can sometimes lead to the lowest possible consumer utility, and that the introduction of bribes in these environments can restore some of that utility via implementing second-best information transmission.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155654/1/reviews-v6.pd

Modeling Broadband Ocean Acoustic Transmissions with Time-Varying Sea Surfaces

Solutions to ocean acoustic scattering problems are often formulated in the frequency domain, which implies that the surface is frozen in time. This may be reasonable for short duration signals but breaks down if the surface changes appreciably over the transmission time. Frequency domain solutions are also impractical for source-receiver ranges and frequency bands typical for applications such as acoustic communications (e.g. hundreds to thousands of meters, 1-50 kHz band). In addition, a driving factor in the performance of certain acoustic systems is the Doppler spread, which is often introduced from sea-surface movement. The time-varying nature of the sea surface adds complexity and often leads to a statistical description for the variations in received signals. A purely statistical description likely limits the insight that modeling generally provides. In this paper, time-domain modeling approaches to the sea-surface scattering problem are described. As a benchmark for comparison, the Helmholtz integral equation is used for solutions to static, time-harmonic rough surface problems. The integral equation approach is not practical for time-evolving rough surfaces and two alternatives are formulated. The first approach is relatively simple using ray theory. This is followed with a ray-based formulation of the Helmholtz integral equation with a time-domain Kirchhoff approximation